ALLy Darian Worden mentioned organizing a New Jersey chapter a while back of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. Now that he’s freshly returned from taking to the streets in St. Paul, he announced today that New Jersey ALL has entered the world of the webbed at nj.libertarianleft.org.

For a sample of what they’ve been working on, here’s a flyer they used to spread the good news about Direct Action and Mutual Aid to burned-out Ron Paul supporters in St. Paul:

Freedom in chains! Dissent in cages!

The two party system has failed to uphold liberty. The electoral process has failed to restore liberty.

Participating in elections is playing on the tyrants' turf by the tyrants' rules. It is an attempt to wring liberty from a system that is set up to keep the people in chains.

So what is a liberty lover to do? Fortunately there are many approaches. The following suggestions overlap each other and provide effective methods of fighting government oppression.

Think Direct Action – Bypass the rigged political system and instead organize the people to affect the changes you wish to see.

Think Market Based Alternatives – A system of voluntary trade and cooperation is not only more just and productive than statist intervention, but when economic activity is focused on undermining the state, the power of true entrepreneurs can destroy the system of political power and privilege.

Think Mutual Aid – Individuals cooperate for mutual gain and help each other with no centralized control. Looking out for each other is participatory insurance for a free world.

Think Civil Disobedience – Why do you have a conscience if you were not meant to use it? Whether confrontational or not, civil disobedience can be effective at gaining a little liberty now and a lot of liberty tomorrow.

Think Communication – Alternative media and information campaigns can bypass the press and go straight to the people, or exploit the press for liberty's gain.

Instead of working within the system, why not work on building a new society within the shell of the old? Together we can build a society of liberty, where the rights of every individual to life, liberty, and justly acquired property are respected and upheld regardless of race, religion, trade, orientation, or geographical origin.

Free the Markets – Free the People

Agora! Anarchy! Action!

all-left.net

agorism.info

mutualist.org

There’s a ready-to-print PDF of the flyer

While you’re at it, also check out ready-to-print PDF of the counter-recruitment flyer that they are posting in the New Jersey area.

And here’s some of what they’re working on now:

Activities

Our current projects include loitering law street theater and literature distibution, and counter-recruitment flyering. We are also looking to expand our activist base from its humble beginnings.

Get Involved

To get involved or to just learn more, contact us at nj.libertarianleft (at) gmail.com

— From nj.libertarianleft.org

Welcome to the Revolution, New Jersey ALLies!

As a sidebar, I will mention that the subdomain name and the hosting space are being provided by, well, me. Which I bring up as a way to segue into mentioning that if you (yes, you, gentle reader) happen to be organizing a local ALL chapter, and are in need of a subdomain name (in the format ____.libertarianleft.org), or in need of web hosting, or in need of both, then contact me. While traffic remains relatively low, the hosting will be free. If in the course of the Revoution traffic should spike to the point that I need to upgrade my servers or Internet connection to handle it, I would just ask a nominal fee to help handle the costs–certainly less than anything you’d get from buying a commercial web hosting plan. Solidarity economy and all that, don’t you know.

Show me what a police state looks like…

This is what a police state looks like!

In the interest of equal time, this footage comes from the streets of Occupied Denver, during the protests outside of the Democratic National Coronation. While police repression was much less severe in Denver than in St. Paul, the city government’s use of fascist free speech zone cages was much more extensive, and the paramilitary cadres in Denver engaged in plenty of their own pre-emptive raids on activists, round-ups and mass arrests, pepper-spraying, beatings with batons, and all the rest.

Remember that so-called electoral democracy — in fact, nothing more than an imperial elective oligarchy — never means that we (meaning you and I and our neighbors) are respected as sovereign individuals or left alone to manage our own affairs. What it means is that a highly organized, heavily armed elite insists on the privilege of representing us, ruling over us, and ordering us around, on the excuse that, once every several years, we are given some minimal opportunity to select which of two tightly regimented political parties will take control of the ruling apparatus. It is, in other words, not freedom, but rather a Party State, in which we are given only the choice of which of two bureaucratic political parties might control our lives and livelihoods, with their authority supposedly justified by the ritual of elections and the mandate of popular sovereignty. And if the people (again, meaning you and I and our neighbors) should dare to think that we might challenge the authority of the regime supposedly representing us, you'll find that it's the people that go out the window, not the rigged electoral system or the parties' grasp on the authority supposedly derived from those people.

See also:

• GT 2008-09-09: Cops are here to protect you. (#7)
• GT 2008-09-05: Free the St. Paul 8 and all political prisoners!
• GT 2008-09-05: Emergency action alert: Twin Cities protesters imprisoned without charges; human rights abuses in Ramsey County jail. Free all political prisoners!
• GT 2008-09-04: This is what a police state looks like. (Part 2 of ???)
• GT 2008-09-03: This is what a police state looks like. (Part 1 of ???)

From Drug War Chronicle (2008-08-22): Feature: The Drug Checkpoint That Wasn’t — Louisiana Lawmen Play Fast and Loose with the Constitution:

In its 2000 decision in Indianapolis v. Edmond, the US Supreme Court held that the city’s effort to attack the drug trade by holding a checkpoint to look for drugs was an unconstitutional violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection of the right to be free from unwarranted searches and seizures. But in the years since then, a handful of departments across the county, usually in the South, have brazenly trumpeted their resort to drug checkpoints.

The latest department to step into the breach was Louisiana’s Beauregard Parish Sheriff’s Office, which held such a checkpoint last Thursday night near the town of Starks. Following the lead of sheriff’s deputies, the local newspaper was all over the story.

Narcotics checkpoint a success, blared the headline in Monday’s Derrider Daily News story on the police action. The article went on to explain how, following complaints of drug dealing in the neighborhood, police decided to take action:

The Beauregard Parish Sheriff’s Office set up a Narcotics Checkpoint Thursday night near Starks, Louisiana, the local paper reported. Due to several complaints coming from the Fields area, the BPSO put together a joint operation with the help of Sheriff Ricky Moses and the DeRidder city police department. The operations utilized several BPSO deputies as well as the new Drug Interdiction team led by Detectives Dale Sharp and Greg Hill. Seven police units total were used for the operation in addition to four other units performing regular patrols.

The checkpoint resulted in three arrests for marijuana and hydrocodone possession, a quarter pound of marijuana being tossed from an unknown vehicle’s window, and a number of traffic citations.

If this really was a drug checkpoint, it is clearly unconstitutional, said Steve Silverman, executive director of the constitutional rights defense group Flex Your Rights.

Well, O.K., whatever. If you are ever hauled into court as the result of one of these checkpoints, that’s important information to have. But the problem is that cops are, as a rule, better at manipulating the court than you are; they are trained in how to exploit loopholes, how to manipulate people, and how to get cheap sympathy from judges and juries. As Silverman himself says:

If people went to court and fought it, the evidence would be dismissed — unless they consented to a search. The sheriff down there must know checkpoints like this are constitutionally questionable, but they can still ask people to consent, and they know how to phrase that request in such a way that people are likely to consent, he said.

The problem with these roadblocks and checkpoints by uniformed highwaymen, which impose blanket screening of ordinary people by police and which intimidate or force everyone to submit to interrogation and searches, treating anyone who happens to be on a particular road as a presumptive criminal, who needs to prove her innocence to the police in order to be left alone to go about her own business, based on no probable cause whatever — and all in order to find and imprison a handful of nonviolent drug traffickers, who are violating absolutely nobody’s rights, who are doing a peaceful and productive service for willing customers, whose only crime was to defy a senseless government prohibition on the kinds of chemicals that people may willingly put into their own bodies — the problem with that, I say, has nothing to do with whether these internal checkpoints and constrictions on peaceful people’s freedom of movement and security in their persons and effects, happen to be consistent or inconsistent with a fundamentalist reading of the words scribbled onto a 200-year-old piece of paper. The real problem is not that this kind of Ihre Papiere, bitte treatment is unconstitutional; it’s that it’s tyrannical. Tyranny is bad enough whether or not the Nine can be convinced that it can be excused on a legal technicality, and the reasons why are moral, not constitutional. Even when cops can invent absurd technicalities in order to convince a judge (who is always willing to be convinced that another State employee was acting within bounds) that their extraction of searches through intimidation, coercion, and the inevitable recourse to the threat of arbitrary arrest on any of the countless vague laws that nobody can possibly avoid violating in daily life, all somehow amounts to consent. And those of us who oppose the drug war, and the police state that has emerged in order to prosecute it, ought to be more clear and less timid about saying so. We don’t need The Law on our side to be right. If the Constitution allows that kind of brigandry and tyranny, then the Constitution itself is tyrannical. If the Constitution does not allow it, then it has been demonstrated as thoroughly as you please that the Constitution can do nothing effective to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist, and certainly undeserving of our deferential appeals.

In related news, holiday bloggers should keep in mind that there are only 7 more ranting days left before International Ignore the Constitution Day.

See also:

• GT 2007-12-04: We put the Arch in Anarchy #2
• GT 2007-09-06: Marching orders
• GT 2006-01-25: We put the Arch in Anarchy
• GT 2006-01-05: An Open Question for Constitutionalist Liberals